Algorithmic Foundations of the Internet

1
Algorithmic Foundations of the Internet

• Alejandro Lopez-Ortiz (Waterloo)
• Jennifer Rexford (Princeton)
• Rebecca Wright (Stevens)

2
Planned Three-Year Special Focus

• Many challenges facing the Internet
• Scalability
• Reliability
• Security
• Manageability
• other X-ities
• Need for a strong algorithmic foundation
• Deepening the understanding of the existing
  protocols
• Improving the operation of these protocols
• Guiding for the design of the future Internet
• Cross-disciplinary research
• Networks, theory of computing, security, game
  theory,

3
The Need to Bridge the Gap

• Traditional algorithms research does not capture
• Autonomy
• Scalability
• Privacy
• all crucial aspects of the Internet
• Internet protocol-adoption process emphasizes
• Intuition and experience
• Experimentation and testing
• and not formal analysis of behavior
• Result protocols with a variety of problems
• Correctness, performance, security, management,

4
Planned Workshops

• Goals of the workshops
• Bring together researchers in multiple
  disciplines
• Introduce students and post-docs to the field
• Catalyze collaborations across disciplines
• Example workshop topics
• Secure interdomain routing
• Wireless and delay-tolerant networks
• Streaming algorithms for network measurement
• Tomography for network troubleshooting
• Internet economics and game theory

5
Other Planned Activities

• Tutorials
• Integrating research and education
• Providing domain knowledge about the area
• Highlighting important unsolved research problems
• Visitors
• Short-term visits before/after a workshop
• Long-term visits for a few months
• Reading lists of key research results
• Theory/algorithms papers relevant to networking
• Networking papers identifying unsolved problems
• K-12 education
• Internet algorithms part in crash course in
  discrete math

6
NSF FIND and GENI Projects

• Synergy with major NSF CISE initiatives
• Future INternet Design (FIND)
• Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI)
• Clean-slate rethinking of the Internet
  architecture
• A unique opportunity for foundational research to
  have a major impact on the future of the Internet
• A desire to enable collaboration between the
  networking and theoretical computer science
  communities
• A need to identify fundamental problems with the
  existing protocols and promising areas for
  improvement
• Applying for NSF support for the special focus
• Submitting the grant proposal during this month

7
Current Status

• Identified the main workshop and tutorial topics
• Important problems facing data networking
• Areas where an algorithmic focus provides
  leverage
• Drafted a grant proposal to submit to NSF
• Submission planned sometime this month